


for always roaming with a hungry heart

by lagardère (laurore)



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: (of all of them to some degree), Character Study, Gen, M/M, POV Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:35:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25959913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurore/pseuds/lagard%C3%A8re
Summary: “Do you remember the day we met?” Nicky asks.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 63
Kudos: 393





	for always roaming with a hungry heart

**Author's Note:**

> \- the topic (memory) must have been covered already; i also sort of set out to make a point that i absolutely lost along the way, but i had fun? and that’s what counts
> 
> \- this being my first foray into this fandom, i’m not too sure where it stands on accents. as a french person i couldn’t write sébastien without an accent, and if i did that i couldn’t write nicolò without one. willing to amend any other cultural detail i might have missed out of ignorance!

Memory is a fickle, unreliable thing. Don’t they know it, all of them, even the younger ones? Nile who admits she could stare at pictures of her family and still struggle to remember more than what those pictures reveal to her, static features - frozen smiles - the voices distant, half-imagined, their pitch uncertain. 

Once, when Nicolò had unwisely accepted, not a glass, but a full bottle from Sébastien, and he’d drunk that bottle, and they’d fallen back shoulder to shoulder on yet another sunken couch in yet another dilapidated house, ramshackle but safe, the battens sagging above them, nothing in the hearth but a dying fire that neither of them would revive, Sébastien had pulled out a book - leatherbound, the title in gilded letters along the side. 

“It’s a novel about an Italian nobleman,” he’d said, in Italian because that was the language he shared with Nicolò and Yusuf, while he spoke French with Andromache. They wouldn’t fully switch to English until the early 1900s. “There’s a passage about war,” Sébastien went on, “as seen through the eyes of a young soldier fighting for Napoléon, and sometimes I reread it, to remember what it was like. Is it cheating, do you think? To replace what I’ve started to forget with someone else’s depiction of it?”

“I don’t know,” Nicolò had answered, because Yusuf was the one who had a way with words, and Nicolò, he felt (and feels) like he must weigh every which one and like none of them will ever convey his meaning, no matter what language he chooses.

Besides, they were abysmally drunk.

Still, he’d tried, shoulders pushing up against the threadbare leather. “Why does it mean something to you, the way this author writes about war?”

“I wasn’t at Waterloo,” Sébastien had answered. “You know I died during the campaign in Russia. But it has to do with war. How the author understands the cacophony of war. That momentous events are little more than noise to you when you’re lost in the middle of it.”

And even this memory, Nicky is interpreting in retrospect, because he knows that’s what Sébastien had _meant,_ even if he’d lacked some of the Italian vocabulary. Other things he recalls from that night: how disgusting the wine was, even though Andromache had sworn it was the finest vintage the vineyards of Burgundy had produced in decades; how this whole conversation and the wine had been an attempt at whiling away the time until Andromache and Yusuf returned. How Nicolò had smelled smoke on Yusuf’s clothes when they had, and Yusuf had smelled the alcohol on his breath, and they’d both known better than to talk about it. Sébastien - who had given them a number of looks when he’d found out they were lovers, and who’d said something in French about how all soldiers need comfort and who was he to judge where they found it - he’d graciously given them use of the couch.

(“You should read it,” Sébastien had suggested, handing him the book. “The author is deeply in love with Italy,” and Nicolò had taken it and thanked him, and refrained from explaining that he didn’t consider himself Italian, not in the way that Sébastien considered himself French; he didn’t have the words for that either, he wouldn’t find them for another few decades, for the nineteenth century had begun its invention of nationalisms but had yet to theorise it.)

Sometimes some of them go their separate ways for years or even decades, and then reunite much like mortal friends would after a long separation, exchanging the news of the time they spent apart, but Joe and Nicky haven’t parted for over a century, not since the First World War started and found them stranded on opposite sides of Europe, and with Andy’s regenerative abilities fading, this increased awareness that their immortality is as ephemeral as everything else bar the ties that bind them all together, he doubts they will reiterate the experience, with the notable exception of Booker’s exile. Still, it used to be that they would leave conversations hanging for years, picking them up as if they’d only started them the previous day, and so it had been of the conversation with Sébastien. 

Nicolò had mulled it over, this idea of art as a repository for their memories, and a few years on he’d told Sébastien about the art that Andromache collected, or rather, hoarded, not only out of aesthetic affinity but because each piece would trigger a separate souvenir, like that little bust by Rodin that she’d taken away with her at the end of several months spent working in the sculptor’s workshop, with clay up to her elbows, wearing a white smock that they’d use a year on to stem a worker’s gut wound during food riots in Milan; or that drawing by Goya of two misshapen witches preparing to fly under the eyes of their sallow-faced, open-mouthed judges. Andromache had never met Goya and Goya hadn’t had the witches of England in mind as he diluted his ink, soaking the inquisitors in shadows and bathing the witches in bright light, but there was something about the drawing that spoke to her all the same.

A hundred years later, Nicky and Booker had picked up the threads of that talk again as they wandered the Louvre and the gallery of early nineteenth century paintings that had been made to depict Napoléon’s achievements. Booker had come to a complete stop in front of one of them, a winter scene where Napoléon sat astride his horse as he saluted his soldiers at the end of a battle. The subject of the painting had been almost secondary to the grotesque heap of contorted bodies in the forefront, half covered in snow, and Booker had said, _I remember this,_ looking not at the Emperor but at the leaden sky, at the bodies in the snow, before Andy had looped her arm through his and tugged him onwards.

Although each passing century comforts Nicky in the idea that there isn’t much that can be known with any certainty, this at least has proven true, time and again: old as they are, be it twenty years or two hundred or a millenia, without the traces and keepsakes and documents that they’ve accrued and hidden, their memories wouldn’t be enough. They either forget or drown in what they do remember; and it feels safer, sometimes, to store their memories of war in a sword or a scimitar, to leave the dead behind in museums and the cellars of buildings they only visit once every other decade, so they won’t have to confront what they’ve lost each time they close their eyes or, the way Booker does, at the bottom of a bottle that hasn’t chased away much more than loneliness or guilt, certainly not the ghosts he tried to run away from.

Perhaps it will be easier now that they have Copley to keep track of their battles for them; certainly it will be different. Some of it will remain the same, Andy with her art and Booker with his drinking, Nicky reading in a variety of languages and finding himself in the quiet of those moments as words gain meaning in whatever language the book is in, gradually, as he picks up books he hadn’t read in years, picks up languages he didn’t use to speak. It’s a lesson that Joe taught him several lifetimes ago: how to read poetry so that each reading acquires a new significance, how to read philosophy so that each reading brings about new questions instead of fallible answers. 

At some point during the nineteenth century, the two of them had finally decided to build a library in a house they’d bought with Andromache in London, but the library had burnt down during the Blitz and since then neither of them has had the heart to undergo the prolonged process of reading and collecting that might produce a new one. Quite a number of Joe’s maps had been destroyed in the fire as well; centuries-worth of them, some he had been given and some he’d bought and some he’d made himself, coloured on passing scraps of paper or sketched on the flyleaf of books, the oldest copied on vellum with an intricacy of detail.

He had developed the taste for them early on, and Nicky well remembers the first one, an edition of a map of the world by a Venetian monk where Jerusalem was placed near but no longer at the centre of the world, science coming up against the long-held belief that the holy city was the point from which all history emanated. Then there had been maps of the edges of the world as they began to acquire coastlines and mountain ranges and rivers and borders, and maps of every city they had ever been to. Since the fire, this is the only sort of map that Joe continues to draw, emphasising topographical features at times, or the intricate network of public transports until all the cities in which they have lived and fought and loved each other become mazes of criss-crossing lines that Nicky would be hard-pressed to decipher. 

Not that he minds it. There is a healing power to such images, which enclose within themselves sword wounds and bullet wounds, their guts spilled on the pavement of towns old and new on six different continents. (They did travel to Antarctica once, but none of them had died there and Nicky suspects the trip had taken place because they knew he wanted to see the ice shelves, and not, as Andy had presented it, to prevent an international conflict between the forty or so researchers present on base when they’d visited. It’d been shortly after the Siege of Sarajevo and all of them had needed a break.)

He’d first noticed it a long time ago, how their memories fade and warp with time, until all that remains is impressions of things that might have happened, certainties that are only certainties because they are shared.

On the night Booker leaves them - on the night they leave him behind - they retreat to a house on the outskirts of London. There Andy can finally sleep off their escape from Merrick’s lab while Nile peruses a binder of documents Copley gave them, her eagerness to work a clear sign that she’s trying to evade whatever else is keeping her awake and preoccupied, be it her newfound immortality or thoughts of the life and people she’s lost. Joe had suggested a sparring session that she’d declined, to Nicky’s relief; he can tell that they’re exhausted, all of them, and it doesn’t matter how easily they heal, the pain is that much harder to bear when it comes on the back of days of physical and spiritual strain.

“Do you remember the day we met?” Nicky asks, once him and Joe have retreated to one of the bare rooms, little more than a mattress on the floor and a stack of books Booker must have left the last time he slept here, based on the fact that they’re all in French and crinkled with whatever he’d drunk and spilt at the time. They didn’t exactly leave the main room out of a need for privacy, but rather because it felt like they were taking up too much space, the two of them and the pent-up tension of their kidnapping and escape threatening to wake up Andy, to suggest to Nile that she should keep an eye on them, instead of looking after herself. 

“Of course I remember,” Joe says, as he sits down cross-legged on the mattress. Nicky hopes the holes in it haven’t been made by rats. Even after nine hundred years, there’s things you don’t get used to. “I’m sure I’ve forgotten the finer details of many of the battles we fought together,” Joe goes on, “but I’ll never forget the first one. That first sight of you on the battlefield, after I’d dreamt of you for many nights... I knew I was destined to kill you.”

This is hardly the first time they have had this conversation, although it never plays out quite the same way. Nicky couldn’t say exactly why they do it; in part because they take some pleasure reliving those days, maybe, harrowing as they might have been, but it might also be that they need to evoke them in order to keep the memory alive. Nicky had tried writing as precise an account as he could of their first encounters, he thinks it must have been in the 17th century, after Quynh disappeared, and then this as many of his other possessions had been lost, he couldn’t even say where or when anymore, and it probably wasn’t accurate anyways, full of whatever he was feeling when he wrote it, a temporary disgust of battle seeping into the text, a momentary worry about the finite nature of all things leading him to think that he would eventually be alone as well. Such thoughts seem futile these days. He came into this life with Joe and they’ll leave it together, that much he knows.

“Your horse had just thrown you off, there were arrows jutting out of its neck and flanks… I cut you here,” Joe repeats the motion, hands slashing through the air above Nicky’s midriff. “You brought your sword up twice, once under my arm and the second time,” he taps his knuckles against his heart, “through my chest. I died before you did. What do you remember?”

“Blood,” Nicky answers. “How blue the sky was. I know you think we fought miles away from the city, but I remember the walls rising above us as you came towards me... You looked ferocious. I’d been dreaming of you, but I thought it was my death that I was dreaming of, that you’d be the one to kill me. When my wounds healed I thought God was putting me to the test... And later, that maybe we’d been the gods all along. Just the two of us, apart from the rest of the world.”

“We’ve seen far too much to believe that, haven’t we?” Joe murmurs, and Nicky knows he isn’t merely thinking about the horrors they’ve witnessed, but also of Andy losing her immortality.

“Gods have to die too, don’t they?” Nicky muses, and leans in to kiss him.

Under the walls of Jerusalem, or perhaps miles and miles away, they’d killed each other until they’d both had enough. Nicky has forgotten the number of times it happened and some of the methods they used, whatever was at hand, his sword and Joe’s scimitar and daggers and stones and their bare hands, until the day he’d crawled out of the river where Joe had drowned him and found his enemy waiting for him, sitting in the sand, and though the scimitar was within reach Joe had his arms around his knees, and he’d said something Nicky hadn’t understood, but he’d nodded all the same.

Whatever they’ve lost along the way, it has never worried him. After all, they don’t need many material possessions to keep track of who they are and have been. Nothing but the weapons they carried when they first died, and their bodies, which remain the first and most dependable of keepsakes.

The first time, they had fallen upon each other much like they had in battle, with a manner of bloodlust, and Nicky needs only come within reach of Joe to remember how that had felt, this insatiable desire that he’d tried to quell again and again in a frenesy of kissing and biting and mindless thrusting, and he doesn’t have to act upon it to know it’s still there; they have gone years without sex (rarely more than one without touching each other) but he’d be lying if he said he doesn’t know what Booker is missing. What memories Nicky cares to keep are stored in Joe’s arms as they encircle his waist and bear him down upon the mattress, in the steadying weight of Joe’s body pressed against his, the familiar jut of his hip bones digging into Nicky’s thighs, the rough lines of old scars that he follows lightly with his fingers. And yet for all the comfort of old habits there is always a newness to it - a moment of surprised silence as Joe penetrates him, a small shocked murmur slipping past his lips in a dialect he hasn’t spoken in centuries, his hands leaving bruises on Joe’s shoulders that will fade with the sunrise.

“You always ask me how we met,” Joe whispers to him afterwards, as Nicky lies in his arms and allows himself another few minutes before he rises, and gets dressed, and finds a gun to place within their reach in case they should need it. “You never ask me about our first kiss.”

“In that galley,” Nicky mumbles. “When we were crossing the Mediterranean.”

“No, it was long before that,” Joe corrects him. “We’d just drowned. When I pulled myself out of that river I thought I’d wait for you, see if you wanted to have another go at it... And when you did drag yourself out of the water… It had been days and we had no armour left. Our clothes were in tatters. I thought then that if any death was going to stick, it’d be starvation. I asked you if you wanted to fight me again, and you knelt before me in the sand - your face streaked with blood and mud, you had the clearest eyes I’d ever seen but the light was all but gone out of them - and you kissed my feet.”

Nicky snorts. “I did not.”

“You did,” Joe insists gently. “And then you passed out.”

Memory is a fickle and unreliable thing. Don’t they know it, all of them, especially the older ones? Andy who fights, and travels, and lives on autopilot sometimes, as if she’s momentarily forgotten what it means to be human, sending them a letter from the banks of the Lake Baikal after she’d crossed the Soviet Union on foot just to keep walking (just to keep herself breathing), picking the occasional fight she has no intention to win, out of sheer exhaustion, maybe. Out of forgetfulness or out of a desire to forget. 

“What are you thinking about?” Joe whispers in the dark room. The steady beat of Joe’s heart seems to echo inside Nicky’s ribcage.

This must have been why they were brought together, Nicky thinks - not so much as an increase in firepower or muscle but as living reminders of what a brutal and necessary and thoroughly human thing it is to care for other people.

“The fire and the fury,” he says. “The passing of time. And of you, of course.”

**Author's Note:**

> [napoléon at the battle of Eylau](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Gros%2C_Napoleon_at_Eylau.jpg)   
>  [goya’s brujas à volar](https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.73851.html)   
>  [fra mauro’s map of the world](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/FraMauroDetailedMap.jpg)
> 
> now with some excellent [art](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/flurgburgler/627260214718103552) by @flurgburgler!


End file.
